Heena Sharma Blog

Google on Tuesday said that it has found no evidence that its Search algorithms were showing the Pakistani flag when looked for the "best toilet paper in the world", the "best China-made toilet paper" or just " toilet paper ". "While we continue to investigate the matter, we have not found any evidence that Google Images was ranking the Pakistani flag in response to this particular search," a company spokesperson said. "Many news outlets wrote about an old screenshot from a meme website that is inconsistent with our UI (user interface) and dates back to 2017, and we have not seen any independent verification that these results ever appeared as depicted," the spokesperson added. Earlier, media reports said a glitch on Google Search results was noticed after the February 14 Pulwama terror attack that left 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troopers dead. Screenshots of the search results went viral as memes, posts and...

More Indians living in villages owned a latrine in 2018 than four years ago, yet 44% of them still defecate in the open, according to a survey covering Rajasthan, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh that was released on January 4, 2019. These four states together contain two-fifths of India's rural population and reported high open defecation rates, over 68% in 2016, as per this government report. Almost a quarter (23%) of those who own a latrine defecated in the open, a figure that has remained unchanged since 2014, researchers found. This can mostly be attributed to deeply entrenched beliefs about caste “impurity” associated with emptying latrine pits, the paper concluded. “ Changes in open defecation in rural north India: 2014 – 2018”, a working paper published by the research and policy advocacy Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) and New Delhi-based policy think tank Accountability Initiative (AI), is based on surveys of over 9,812 people and 15...